The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

the running man wrote:Rumour has it that a lot of people will not deal with smk...2 dealers I know personally will not deal with them either....

Quite some time back (pre Remington buyout) I tried to get some SMK airgun spares.
Ordered them via SMK stockists in Scotland (2) England (3) & Wales (1) over a period of about 3 years.
Also phoned & e-mailed the main SMK offices several times during all this.
Never received the required parts.....

Had about the same level of customer service over some Blackhawk kit too (not an SMK import) - so nothing new with Remington importers as far as I can tell....

I was about to add, more like SMK will not deal with some potential resellers, I know of a couple of RFD's who just recently have not received replies to enquiries.

MistAgain wrote:Back when we had handguns , the big 3 were Parker Hale , Edgars and Viking .

Edgars and Viking survived and even got bigger because they had proper business policies , Parker Hale failed .

Parker Hale failed simply because they did not sell their products at a proper price and did not enforce proper pricing by gun dealers .

When Edgars took the Remington account from Hull Cartridge they went flat out to hold stocks of all Remington products , even though deliveries from Remington were always slow .

Edgars tried to enforce a price policy for dealers to make a decent profit for once , even though a few dealers bought their own guns from USA & Germany whenever the exchange rate was good .

Remington had bought SMK well before they cancelled the account with Edgars , and the argument that the account was closed due to Edgars stocking rival brands does not hold water as some of the Remington distributors in USA stock a broad range of products that could be said to clash with Remington products .

Bottom line is the UK is a small market and Remingtons owners , Cerberus Capital Management
want to squeeze every penny they can and control as much of the supply chain as they can get away with .

Just give it a few more years and people will be saying how good Edgar's was at supplying Remington products.

Absolutely agree with most of what you say but I think the reason Parker Hale went to the wall was because a very large part of their business involved Smith & Wesson and was pistol related.

Also of note was that PH were the importers for Beretta before Gunmark (GMK) came along. Edgar Brothers have something of a reputation for "stealing" distributorships from other companies.

In terms of volume , Viking lost more than P-H as they had Colt, Ruger and Manhurin .

My understanding of P-H's demise is that they spent too much on developing the later Mauser action target / cadet / police / military rifles, especially the M85 contender for the army's standard 7.62 sniper rifle post Falklands war. A friend in the trade who knew their MD well forecast this outcome (bankruptcy) within days of the MoD's announcement that it had chosen the AI rifle.

The other models, M84 TR rifle and M87 police weren't selling well (more likely hardly at all by then) and had to be heavily discounted compared to favoured rivals from other companies and the Mod contract 'consolation prize' Cadet rifle had some well publicised quality control problems that didn't help P-H's reputation and no doubt took a lot of money and resources for a small company in rectification work.

There was also the disastrous tie-up with Bremmer Arms for the ersatz M1903 Springfield and the much criticised .22LR M16 knock-off. (Funny thing is I never read a good review of the P-H Bremmer M16 at the time it was in production, but saw an ad for one recently which described it as a great piece of work and much sought after - so I'm left wondering which Bremmer M16, the brilliant one or the crap one, is the real rifle!)

I don't say any of this with any pleasure. I was sad at the time and still am today. I always though they made some great rifles.

Mistagain I wouldn't have thought so because Manhurin were never sold in any real numbers in this country and Colt revolvers were probably outsold by at least five to one by Smiths. Many so called Colt autos were actually made up guns from custom parts imported by numerous different pistolsmiths so weren't really Colts.
As for Ruger most of the Ruger sales by Viking went to the RUC.

Laurie wrote:My understanding of P-H's demise is that they spent too much on developing the later Mauser action target / cadet / police / military rifles, especially the M85 contender for the army's standard 7.62 sniper rifle post Falklands war. A friend in the trade who knew their MD well forecast this outcome (bankruptcy) within days of the MoD's announcement that it had chosen the AI rifle.

The other models, M84 TR rifle and M87 police weren't selling well (more likely hardly at all by then) and had to be heavily discounted compared to favoured rivals from other companies and the Mod contract 'consolation prize' Cadet rifle had some well publicised quality control problems that didn't help P-H's reputation and no doubt took a lot of money and resources for a small company in rectification work.

There was also the disastrous tie-up with Bremmer Arms for the ersatz M1903 Springfield and the much criticised .22LR M16 knock-off. (Funny thing is I never read a good review of the P-H Bremmer M16 at the time it was in production, but saw an ad for one recently which described it as a great piece of work and much sought after - so I'm left wondering which Bremmer M16, the brilliant one or the crap one, is the real rifle!)

I don't say any of this with any pleasure. I was sad at the time and still am today. I always though they made some great rifles.

I too was very sad to see the company go because all my dealings with them had been very positive indeed. Good old fashioned outstanding customer service that I have only ever experienced from one or two American companies.

Chapuis wrote:As for Ruger most of the Ruger sales by Viking went to the RUC.

As an aside to that, the then General Manager of Viking Arms told me a year or two after the ban became law that their first post legislation order for Ruger revolvers was refused an export licence by the US State Department, the application rejected on the grounds that 'as nobody in Britain could now own a revolver, there was no legitimate reason to import any'. It apparently took some months for Viking / Ruger to convince the US bureaucrats that 1) our police could still legally own and use handguns (yes, really!); 2) the ban didn't apply to Northern Ireland and some other parts of the UK; 3) there were exemptions such as 'humane despatch', and 4) Vikings Arms was the European Ruger distributor at the time and the rest of Europe was unaffected.

And we think our Men from the Ministry are dozy. It seems that real life versions of the old Radio 4 comedy's Sir Gregory Pitkin, Deryck Lennox-Brown, and Richard Lamb are alive and well and can be found in Washington!

Laurie about the same time Viking also had all sorts of other problems with N.I. if you remember. I'm not sure which came first but the Americans refused to supply them because the Irish republican supporters there said that they were supplying an oppressive police force namely the R.U.C.
Also there was some sort of administrative cock up with regard to transfers to N.I. and their RFD certificate was suspended or restricted for a short while.

Chapuis wrote:Laurie about the same time Viking also had all sorts of other problems with N.I. if you remember. I'm not sure which came first but the Americans refused to supply them because the Irish republican supporters there said that they were supplying an oppressive police force namely the R.U.C.
Also there was some sort of administrative cock up with regard to transfers to N.I. and their RFD certificate was suspended or restricted for a short while.

It was actually worse than that. So many bobbies descended on their warehouse one morning to clean them out they brought a mobile kitchen with them to feed the troops. After all their firearms / ammo was confiscated the police realised they couldn't store them securely and contracted the army to do so at CAD Longtown near Carlisle. A multi-truck military convoy with armed escorts was en route to Cumbria when it was sorted and the vehicles were told to return to Summerbridge and hand everything back. meanwhile North Yorkshire police had leaked all sorts of lurid allegations about this 'bent' dealer to the redtop press (supplying IRA terrorists with arms etc).

What had actually happened was that the company had a Section 5 license to hold so many semi-auto rifles which was used for the RUC Ruger Mini-14 contract. They got a large order in from the RUC and sent off their entire stock on hand and reordered from Ruger to both make up an outstanding shortfall in the RUC order and to restock their own holdings. These rifles duly arrived in from the USA and all was well. Then for reasons that I don't know, without any warning or advice, the RUC returned the entire order to Summerbridge and the first Viking knew of this was when the local village Post Office telephoned late on a Friday afternoon saying a large consignment of firearms had been received from the RUC and as the premises weren't fully secure would Viking please pick them up before 5pm when they closed. Realising what they were Viking was in a quandary -accepting them took the stock level over their S5 authority but the alternative was to leave them in a low security building at a time when terrorism was a major national issue. So they picked the rifles up. They telephoned the FLO and got the last clerk about to leave before the weekend and told him/her what they were doing and why. This obviously went up the chain of command over the weekend and a dawn raid led by a county ACC was mounted on the Monday with the company's RFD and S5 authorities suspended. Viking's owners are long established Yorkshire folks with influence and 'clout' and MPs, the Home secretary, who knows the PM herself, soon involved and it was sorted out in 48 hours or so and rumour had it that one or two senior officers' careers suffered as a result of this 'anti-terrorist operation' fiasco.